The server itself is mainly used for file sharing and as a media server but the Mini’s achilles heel is it’s lack of internal storage. Although I’ve installed two WD Blue 1TB drives, one acts as a mirror of the other so I only have 1TB of storage.

Enter the LaCie 2big Quadra with it’s two 3TB drives arranged as a RAID 1 array. Storage sorted for the foresable future. However, the LaCie proved to be a serious headache in terms of configuration. With the drive setup and LaCie Desktop Manager installed I set about copying my data on to the new disk in readiness for attaching it to the server. During the process though, the drive would frequently spin down while not is use. Then, when you click back onto the drive it needs to respin the disks. This continued even with the OS X Energy Saver system pref set to NOT Put hard disks to sleep when possible. Thinking it may be caused by Apple’s gradual slackening of support for Firewire (a technology they invented) I swapped to USB. As my iMac is getting a bit elderly now, it only has USB 2 but the 2big (like almost all USB devices) is backward compatible so no probs there. Not so. The drive still spun down at out times and then would spin up while the Mac was asleep!

I wondered if Apple was slackening support for USB 2 as well as Firewire so I tried the drive on the Mac Mini server that the LaCie drive had been bought for complete with its USB 3 ports. Same issue. Random spin downs while awake and spin ups when asleep.

After contacting LaCie support, I tried the drive on a 2012 iMac at work. On this Mac, the LaCie worked fine. Absolutely faultless. Weird. So, I tried it on a 2008 Mac Pro that we use at work as a fire server (and, like my 2009 iMac, only has USB 2). Again, it was perfect. I was starting to suspect that the drive just didn’t like my house! So, with one more Mac available, my 2013 MacBook Pro, I tried again. Faultless operation and this time in my house!

I started to wonder what the link between my 2009 iMac and my 2012 Mac Mini could be. The Mini was running Mountain Lion and the iMac Yosemite so it wasn’t an OS X issue (so I apologise Apple – maybe you’re support for Firewire and USB 2 isn’t as flaky as I thought). I wasn’t an interface issue as the thing had been proven to work on USB 3, Firewire 800 and USB 2 on the Macs at work so what was it?

Finally, I made the connection. I had installed LaCie Desktop Manager on both the 2009 iMac and the 2012 Mac Mini. Call  me stupid, but if software is bundled with a device, I kinda assume it’s going to work with the device! Apparently, with LaCie drives, installing the software essentially stops the hardware working correctly.

Once LDM was uninstalled the drive started working fine on both Macs. FWIW I went all out and trashed the app, a couple of plist files and a kernel extension (LaCieScsiType00.kext).

So far all seems well. I have just made another minor tweak. As per this article:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/6607988

I’ve just stopped Spotlight indexing the drive as I was getting sporadic drive ejections. Hopefully this will fix the issue completely. I’ll keep you posted.

I’ve recently been putting the finishing touches to my home work station. As my working week is split between an office in Norwich and my ‘Den’ at home, my work station needs to be flexible enough to allow me to move between these locations quickly, easily and effectively. A laptop is central to this as, by default, it allows me to take my files, my work and my life with me. I’ve used Apple laptops for over a decade now and currently use a late 2011 15″ MacBook Pro with a quad core 2.4ghz i7 processor. Initially, I was pretty disappointed with this machine. It came with OS X 10.7 ‘Lion’ installed but this was quickly upgraded to 10.8 ‘Mountain Lion’ which, at the time had just been released. Mountain Lion seemed to chug along painfully slowly and made the experience of using the MacBook feel a bit like a £1400 downgrade! Things didn’t improve when the main board failed giving the laptop a very Windows-like blue screen of death. Repair was swift (and under warranty) by Stormfront – my local Mac reseller in Bury St. Edmunds but the lethargy in operation was still there. My research suggested that I/O seemed to be the biggest bottleneck with the pitiful 5400rpm hard drive the key offender. As Christmas approached I splashed out and bought a 512GB SSD drive for the Mac and also used the opportunity to upgrade it from the Apple-standard 4GB of RAM to the system max of 16GB. What an improvement. I have to say that this was the most impressive upgrade that I’ve ever performed on any computer. The MacBook was like a new (and very, very fast) machine with the phrase ‘new lease of life’ not really doing it justice.

So, what was next? With the MacBook now performing as required, it was time to start utilising it better when working from home where my wife and I have a 2010 27″ iMac. It’s probably overkill for listening to music on and sorting out our photos on Aperture so I needed to start making better use of it.

Unlike its’ smaller 21.5″ sibling the 27″ iMac has a Mini Display Port socket that can handle input and output (the 21.5″ can only handle Mini Display Port output). Input can only come from another Mini Display Port or (the newer) Thunderbolt sources. Although Apple do sell varying lengths of Thunderbolt cables, these could not be used to connect my MacBook Pro to my iMac as although the former does have a Thunderbolt connection, the latter can only handle Mini Display Port. Apple have never manufactured or sold their own Mini Display Port cables but both Belkin and StarTech do manufacture a Mini Display Port male – Mini Display Port male cable so I opted for Belkin and made the purchase on Amazon.

When the cable arrived I hastily got the machines connected up and straight away, the iMac slipped in to Target Display Mode and my MacBook Pro suddenly had another 3,686,400 crisp and very bright pixels to play with. They were very bright too. Far too bright in fact with no way of reducing the iMac screen brightness.

According to Apple’s documentation on Target Display Mode, the iMac’s keyboard would be locked out while connected to the MacBook Pro with only the brightness, volume and other media keys remaining usable. In my case though the brightness controls definitely were not working. More research identified a well known bug (discussed in depth here) with Mac OS X 10.6.8 (that my iMac was running) which had effectively stopped these control keys working while in Target Display Mode. I tried a couple of Apps (Shades and Brightness Slider respectively) but neither was suitable so it seemed the only other fix was to upgrade the iMac to Mountain Lion. This I duly did, enduring the immense 4.5GB download which zapped 45% of my monthly broadband bandwidth allocation (mental note, I must change my ISP) and (thank goodness) finally the brightness controls worked on the iMac and my arc eyes started to recede.

So, with the final addition being to plug in a USB keyboard to the MacBook Pro, the setup was complete. I used a full-size, wired Apple keyboard for this as these are really, really good keyboards. The key clicks seem more tactile on the wired version of the keyboard and make for a much nicer experience than the wireless equivalent in my opinion. After much tinkering and all of the various upgrades, I have to say, this is the best workstation setup I’ve ever used. The iMac’s stunning display becomes the main working screen with the laptop display available to dump screens on and refer back to. An added bonus is that the iMac itself is still running in the background while you’re using it in Target Display Mode so you can log on to it from your second machine and continue to use it for other tasks (video rendering, playing iTunes etc). Apple’s Screen Sharing facility makes this so simple and means you can jump back and forth between the iMac and MacBook Pro without even having to leave Target Display Mode.

Irritating at this is, it’s still preferable to Window’s nightmarish handling of file extensions with the display options squirreled away amongst a myriad of other ambiguous settings. Don’t believe me? Take a look at the comparison below!

I happened upon an interesting problem today whilst setting up WordPress 3.3.2 on MAMP. Essentially WordPress plays nicely with MAMP so long as you don’t want to switch on the Network feature that has been rolled in to the WordPress core since version 3.0 (it was previously available as WordPress MU (Multi User).

The problem is a result of WordPress Network’s inability to handle a host name with a specified port number. By default, MAMP uses port 8888 and 8889 for Apache and MySQL respectively, resulting in the host name http://localhost:8888 which WordPress Network won’t accept (the setup discussed here fails when using a host name that has a port number appended to it). However, with a few simple config changes to MAMP and and some very minor tinkering on the command line, you can overcome this problem.

Here’s how I got round the problem and got my WordPress Network working nicely on my local Mac. For the record, I’m using OS X 10.6.8 and MAMP version which includes PHP version and MySQL version. It’s also worth noting that, as far as my research could see, it is impossible to setup WordPress network in its sub-domain configuration on MAMP so the only option is to set it up in its sub-directory configuration. This wasn’t an issue for me as I need just this type of configuration.

Switch off OS X’s built in Apache web server.

Head in to System Prefs and make sure that Web Sharing is switched off. Otherwise OS X’s built in Apache server will get in the way of MAMP’s.

Download and install MAMP

No need for the Pro version, just the regular version of MAMP is all you’ll need. More info and download link here.

Configure MAMP

Firstly, set MAMP’s Apache document root to the proposed root of your local WP install. This is likely to be something like this:

/Users/mymacusername/Sites/mydomain/wordpress

Now set MAMP’s Apache and MySQL ports to web server defaults (80 and 3306 respectively). This will cause MAMP to request your OS X admin password whenever you start your MAMP server but if you’re savvy enough to be setting up a local web server, you can probably be trusted with an OS X administrator account!

Configure MAMP using its Preferences options

Edit your hosts file

Open a Terminal window and type:

sudo vi /etc/hosts

This opens the hosts config file in the vi text editor. At the bottom of the file, you’ll need to add the following line:

127.0.0.1 domainalias.co.uk (choose whatever you want for domainalias.co.uk, I used imagespa.co.uk)

Add an entry to your hosts file using OS X's Terminal

This basically means that from now on when you type domainalias.co.uk in to your browser it will actually point to the IP address of your local computer – the localhost.

If you’re unsure of how to use vi, take a look at this very helpful guide.

Restart MAMP

If the MAMP servers are still running, stop them and then quit the application. Ensure that the changes you made to /etc/hosts have been saved and exit your Terminal session. Probably best to restart your browser now as well. If you’re happy to do so, you might also do well to clear the browser cache as well. You can now restart MAMP and your browser. To check that everything is working as expected, create a really basic HTML file and save it in the folder that you specified as MAMP’s Apache root. Save the file as something like test.html and then visit http://mydomainalias.co.uk/test.html in your browser. If everything is ok, the file should render correctly and the host name in your browser address bar shouldn’t append a port number and certainly shouldn’t revert to localhost

Install WordPress

You can now download and install WordPress as normal using mynewdomainalias.co.uk as the WordPress Address (URL) and Site Address (URL) fields within WP’s ‘Settings’ menu. You can create the WordPress database using MAMP’s built-in version of phpMyAdmin. You’ll find full instructions for setting up WordPress locally on MAMP here. Don’t forget that just like our test.html file, WordPress needs to be installed in the folder that you specified when you configured MAMP.

Setup WordPress Network

You should now have a WordPress 3 install working nicely available at http://mydomainalias.co.uk with the WordPress admin available at http://mydomainalias.co.uk/wp-admin

You can now continue with the WordPress Network setup using the Codex instructions found here.